


Responsibility in the key of FU-

by Fashwiing



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Deadpan Snarker Shelke, F/M, Futurefic, Lots of Innuendo, Minor Violence, Tifa Is So Done With Y'all's Shit, Vincent Valentine Can't Talk To Women, Yuffie Kisaragi Makes Questionable Decisions, i'm trying not to think about how long i've been writing for this fandom but GOD, my first yuffentine fic since literally 2009 or something, so congrazzles i'm finally posting it, this has been rotting on my hard drive since late 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 22:23:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14820009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fashwiing/pseuds/Fashwiing
Summary: “Thank you, Shelke. It’s nice to know that at least one of us has the best interests of my entire frickin’ country at heart.” Tifa fixes the Empress with a stony, motherly look. It conveys her intense lack of sympathy for the self-wrought situation rather marvelously. “Hey,” Yuffie continues, “don’t look at me like I’m only shit talking you, here. I’ve grown up. I’ve embraced the fact that I hecked up. I put a God and almost thirty four million Gil in your air conditioning system for safe keeping. Shelke is literally the only responsible person in this building right now.”“Well,” Tifa sighs, uncrossing her arms and brushing some hair out of her face. “At least you can admit it.”“Admit it?” Yuffie laughs, picking bits of cobweb out of her hair. “I’m totally gonna own the hell out of it when I write my memoirs. The Great Ninja Yuffie Kisaragi, bested by a shitty home improvement project. I’ll make millions. I can smell the movie rights from here.”------AVALANCHE: Ten Years Later.





	1. the storm before the second storm

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact I wrote this literally three years ago while I was replaying FFVII so uh. it's set 10-11 years after meteorfall because that's when I started writing it in relation to the release of DoC. the more you knooooooooooow /rainbow

Three days after her very high-profile, very publicly televised coronation as the new Empress of Wutai, Yuffie Kisaragi bursts through the back kitchen door of Seventh Heaven and promptly jumps onto the counter without even so much as a hello.

Tifa, up to her elbows in a sink full of dirty dishes, just sighs heavily.

“Don’t you have a country to run?” Tifa, being Tifa, is exceedingly good at that admonishing motherly tone that makes you feel like you’re five and you’ve just been caught making art on the walls. She hands a wet plate to Shelke, who dries and shelves it before taking the next one. She’s silent, as usual, but a glint of amusement shines in her eyes as she watches the Single White Rose of Wutai, Empress of the Pagoda, Mighty God of Omni and Daughter of Leviathan, unscrew the grate over the air duct and shimmy her way inside.

“Don’t worry. I have a body double,” comes the muffled, echoing reply. A litany of Wutain cursing filters through the ductwork, dust motes drifting down from the ceiling as the ninja makes her way through the building’s aircon.

“You left the running of a small independent nation to an unsuspecting handmaiden?” Shelke calls over her shoulder, never taking her eyes off the dishes as they’re handed to her. She’s gotten taller since the whole thing with Omega, her hair a bit longer and swept up into a ponytail that makes her look like her sister- albeit if her sister had had a fondness for jeggings and shorts paired with Yuffie’s ugly old floral tank tops.

“Ow! Shit!” A loud, harsh bang is the first reply to the question, followed by some ominous rattling of the relatively flimsy ductwork. After a moment, Yuffie’s voice filters out into the hall from a small aircon vent outside the kitchen door. “Of course not! She’s been trained to be my body double since she could walk. That’s the whole point of having a double, duh.”

“I can assume you’re not on dust bunny patrol, then?” Tifa asks, handing a glass to Shelke before putting her back into scrubbing a saucepan crusted with day-old macaroni.

“No way!” There’s a pause, followed by some more shuffling noises. The further Yuffie commando crawls her way down the hall, the harder she is to hear. “You could probably use a whole dust bunny police department, though. Yech, grossness. How can you live with breathing this much dust?”

“It must be all the Mako,” Shelke deadpans, not missing a beat as she dries and puts away the saucepan she’s been handed. Another long pause accompanies her words, and Tifa almost starts to think that Yuffie had been out of earshot before a thump and a bang sound almost directly above their heads.

“Have you been letting her spend time with Cloud? Because she’s turning into one of those deadpan snarkers. Not that I’m complaining, but yeesh. We don’t need more of them.” The ninja’s voice comes from the small aircon duct above the sink, and if she turns and squints hard enough Tifa can almost see the mischievous glint in the younger woman’s eyes as she peers down through the grate at them.

“Yuffie, why are you in the ceiling ducts?” The older woman poses the question knowing that she’ll only get a direct answer with direct wording. In another life the Empress probably would have made a very good attorney, her ability to say everything while simultaneously saying nothing a gift in its own right.

“I stashed Leviathan in here the last time I swung by.” The answer is surprisingly forthcoming, and Tifa blinks slowly as she digests the information. She blinks again, turning to catch Shelke’s gaze in a shared moment of amused exasperation, before she looks back at the aircon duct above her head.

“That was six months ago.” And what a memorable visit it had been. There had been cake, some streamers, and Cid swearing up a storm as he tried to light the candles and caught his arm hair on fire instead. Birthday parties with AVALANCHE were basically guaranteed to never be boring, no matter who of their number actually managed to show up. That particular incident had been for Barret, and surprisingly enough the entire team had managed to be in one building at once- even Reeve, despite the whining and cursing of his personal bodyguards.

“Yeah, I know, but I didn’t know I’d be kidnapped back to the ol’ homestead like a week after that and I’ve been bluffing to my personal advisors about having him in my possession for six freakin’ months. They’re getting antsy.” Yuffie’s voice starts to filter out into the hall again, followed by more thumps and bangs as she shimmies her way through the ductwork.

“Yuffie…” Tifa starts to say, pulling her hands from the soapy sink and wiping them off with the towel Shelke hands her. The ninja is halfway down the hall by now, navigating a bend in the aircon duct as she heads towards the front of the building.

“Yeah Teef?” The woman pauses for a moment, before confusion settles into her tone. “Hey, where did this new filter vent come from?”

“I had Cloud and Barret put it in a few months ago. The hall was getting kinda stuffy.” Tifa makes her way out into the hallway, following the thumping and banging noises to stand beneath the new air vent.

“You didn’t touch my Materia, right?” The Empress stills, her muffled voice sounding suspicious.

“Not when we put the new vent in, no.” Yuffie sees right through the lie of omission, quickly popping the vent cover open from the inside and letting the air filter hit the ground in front of the other woman. Smeared with dust and grime, with a cobweb in her hair, the Empress of Wutai peers down at her friend with narrowed eyes.

“Tifa, where the frick is my Materia.” Tifa sighs, crossing her arms.

“Vincent has it.” She gives the answer with neither pomp nor circumstance, but the simple explanation only serves to make the former head of the WRO’s Intel department regard her with even more suspicion. The Wutain woman stares down at her friend with narrowed eyes, her face screwed up in an expression that could either be constipated or concentrating.

“Tifa, are you shitting me. Because if you’re shitting me, we’re gonna have some issues.” Shelke appears behind Tifa then, soundless and expressionless as always. Yuffie’s suspicious gaze shifts from the martial artist to the fashion-challenged ginger standing behind her, then back again as she deems the woman innocent in these egregious crimes against her person.  

“The bag was making the whole duct system rattle. You could hear it in every room in the building. It was disturbing the customers.” Shelke offers, as though that will somehow diffuse the situation. The Single White Rose of Wutai, Empress of the Pagoda, Mighty God of Omni and Daughter of Leviathan, will not be diffused. She lurks, peering out of the air vent like a particularly vengeful dust monster of some kind or another. When she huffs out a breath like a petulant child, a cloud of dust rises in front of her like the sooty breath of a grumbly dragon.

“Yuffie, if it’s that urgent you can just call Vincent-“

“Tifa, there were twenty one mastered All Materia in that bag.”

Blissful silence reigns supreme between the three women in the wake of that miniscule tidbit of pertinent information. Tifa’s perfectly sculpted eyebrows rise towards her hairline as if of their own volition, her head reeling back slowly as she digests the information. The silence stretches on for a shocked moment, and then another, until only the muffled sound of a door shutting on the second floor breaks it.

“That’s…” the bartender finally begins, eyes wide and shell-shocked at the mere thought of that many mastered All Materia in one place- let alone squirreled away in her aircon system.

“Thirty three million, six hundred thousand Gil at the current market price,” Shelke offers helpfully.

“Five times the contents of the Royal Treasury of Wutai was in that bag, Teef. Plus the Summon that most of my subjects over the age of thirty-five still revere as a frickin’ _Creation God_!” Yuffie oozes her way out of the aircon vent like her spine is a slinky, moving not unlike a cat as she flips expertly and drops to the floor in a shower of dust and fuzz. Her black and orange outfit is coated in a thick layer of the stuff, huge spots marring her mostly bare legs and decorating her hair. “You just _forked it over_ to the one guy who, _to this day_ , refuses to take my calls without playing phone tag first?!”

“Vincent has been reassigned by Reeve to the position of Head of the WRO’s Department of Public Safety. He is currently personally involved in the creation and instruction of his new Department of Administrative Research. His office is on the nineteenth floor of the main WRO building.” Shelke rattles off the information like she’s reading it from a phone book, the bright mirthful smile in her eyes only barely reaching the corners of her mouth. The girl has developed a mischievous streak a mile wide over the past few years, and Yuffie can appreciate that.

“ _Thank you_ , Shelke. It’s nice to know that at least _one of us_ has the best interests of my entire frickin’ country at heart.” Tifa fixes the Empress with a stony, motherly look. It conveys her intense lack of sympathy for the self-wrought situation rather marvelously. “Hey,” Yuffie continues, “don’t look at me like I’m only shit talking you, here. I’ve grown up. I’ve embraced the fact that I hecked up. I put a God and almost thirty four million Gil in your air conditioning system for safe keeping. Shelke is literally the only responsible person in this building right now.”

“Well,” Tifa sighs, uncrossing her arms and brushing some hair out of her face. “At least you can admit it.”

“Admit it?” Yuffie laughs, picking bits of cobweb out of her hair. “I’m totally gonna own the hell out of it when I write my memoirs. The Great Ninja Yuffie Kisaragi, bested by a shitty home improvement project. I’ll make millions. I can smell the movie rights from here.”


	2. I'll kick anybody's ass, I'll kick your ass, I'll kick my own ass!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Rumors of my love for caves and tunnels have been greatly exaggerated.” Vincent brings his coffee cup to his lips, a smile shining in his red eyes as he catches the ninja’s gaze over the rim. He almost looks like he might be about to wink, and the Empress entertains a momentary panic that she really is in the presence of a flirtatious evil twin intent upon world domination. It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing they’d ever faced, to be honest.
> 
> “Didn’t you just spit into that?” she asks instead, her tone innocent. Her face splits into a grin as the gunman spit-takes again, coffee dribbling onto his chin. He coughs and sets the mug aside, his fleeting good mood lost as he makes a face at the complete waste of semi-decent caffeine.
> 
> “Thank you, Yuffie,” he grumbles as he wipes some of the spilt drink from his chin with the back of his hand.

“Vincent, I swear on my great honored father’s grave-“ Yuffie barges into the office of the Head of the Department of Public Safety, a breathless receptionist making strangled noises in her wake as she tries to stop Hurricane Kisaragi.

“Your father is retired, Yuffie. Not dead.” Vincent doesn’t miss a beat in cutting the Empress off before her no-doubt lengthy planned tirade can begin. He waves away the concerned secretary that follows her, letting her totter away in her slightly less-than-office-appropriate heels to catch her breath and let the two of them talk.

“Yeah, well, he may as well be for all the good he does,” Yuffie counters after a moment. “But _anyway_. I swear on my dad’s as-of-yet empty grave that if you don’t rehire all the crazy ninja receptionists I spent _all that time_ training I will personally kick your bony ass from here to Mideel.”

“No,” the department head intones simply. The Wutain woman looks like she’s about to say something, but she stops short. She gesticulates angrily, looking for all the world like she’s resisting the urge to tug on her own hair.

“The frick do you mean, _no_?! I spent all that time and effort training them to be the most deadly office supply assassins outside of freaking Wutai and _you_ apparently fired them all!” She drags one hand down the side of her face, looking like she’s just about ready to do something that could possibly cause an international incident. With a start, she realizes something. “I’m yelling about secretaries and that isn’t even why I’m _here_!”

“I can’t rehire them as receptionists because they make up most of my new Administrative Research department.” Yuffie stops dead in her tracks, pausing her rant long enough to notice something more important than ninjas armed with staplers, thirty three million six hundred thousand Gil, and a God.

“Holy shit, Vinny. You cut your hair.”

“Technically,” the red-eyed man intones without looking up from the paperwork piled across his desk, “my hairdresser cut it.”

His hair is, in fact, a great deal shorter. It frames his face and ends at about his chin, the ridiculous spikes and long tangled locks he’d been known by for so long making him look like a completely different person in their absence. What’s possibly of even more importance is that someone, somewhere, somehow (probably, most likely, almost definitely Reeve) has managed to convince him to lose the beat-up leather jumpsuit in favor of a real suit. Yuffie thinks she might see a tie clip and a lapel pin. Besides the garish red and black stripes of said tie and the gold claws still covering his left hand- sans, surprisingly enough, the rest of the massive gauntlet- he barely even registers as Vincent Valentine. He’s got a fingerless glove on his gun hand. She can see bare finger. It’s exceedingly surreal.

“Who are you?” She asks, taking an exaggerated step backwards. “Are you a mole-man doppelganger, because you’re doing a shitty job if you are.”

“Very cute,” Vincent mutters, reaching for a coffee mug with one hand and flipping through a thick manila file of papers with the other. “Is there something you actually needed, Yuffie?” He takes a sip of his coffee, eyeing the Empress over the rim of the black mug with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, a half-dozen guys that look just like you as imperial concubines, but I guess a girl’s gotta have dreams.” She puts her hands on her hips, a snorting giggle escaping her as the cool and composed department head spit-takes his coffee back into the mug with wide eyes.

“I don’t have time for-“ he starts to say, almost indignant.

“You remember the bag of Materia Tifa found in her aircon?” Yuffie cuts him off. Vincent pauses for a moment, brows furrowing together slightly. Without the bandanna, she realizes, the tall man is much more expressive than he’d ever been before. You can tell a lot about what a man’s thinking when you can actually see his eyebrows, it seems.

“I recall it being full of mastered All Materia, roughly half of which were mine at one point or another.” The dark-haired man composes himself, setting his coffee down with a look of distaste and fixing all of his attention on the Empress. The weight of his red eyes is oddly unnerving, but Yuffie’s been subjected to worse by the other Mighty Gods and her grumpy old deadbeat dad.

“Master-er’s keepers,” she replies simply, not breaking eye contact. “Leviathan was in there too. I need the bag back, Vinnie, along with everything that was in it when I hid it.” The ninja puts on her most imperious Empress face, wishing for the first time in her life that she could have the usual ten pounds of ceremonial robes and fifteen pounds of crown and hair ornaments to back it up.

“What in the Planet’s name could you possibly need with that many All Materia?” Surprisingly, Vincent is the first to break eye contact. He looks away to flip through the stack of files in the inbox on the corner of his desk, extracting one with care. His dismissal has a surprising sting to it, one that raises the ninja’s hackles almost immediately. “I’ve yet to see a weapon made with that many linked equip slots.”

If he had been paying attention, Vincent would have seen a steely calm spread across the face of the Empress of Wutai. She draws herself up to her full height, though it isn’t much, and a look akin to murder flashes in her eyes. As it is, when he looks up, the former Turk is nearly taken aback by the seething demeanor of the woman standing before him. This is no longer the nineteen year old Head of the Intelligence Department of the WRO, but rather the twenty-seven year old Single White Rose of Wutai, Empress of the Pagoda, Mighty God of Omni, Daughter of Leviathan, and ruler of a country whose thousand years of history runs through her veins like the great pounding river of her Serpent God.

“Thirty three million, six hundred thousand Gil, Vincent. That’s what I need with twenty one mastered All Materia. My national school system is failing from a lack of funds and I don’t even know what in Leviathan’s name is going on with the agricultural department. My Minister of Finance is one bounced check away from committing ritual suicide and eighteen Gods-damned years later we’re still wallowing in the shit and the muck that the Shinra ground our faces into after humiliating us for daring to say no to them.” Yuffie is a force of nature in her fury, looming over the front of Vincent’s desk like a cockatrice poised to strike. All thoughts of her personally-trained receptionists, each and every one of them operatives of the Intelligence department she had so lovingly committed herself to for so long, are left by the wayside as her anger makes itself known.

“We’re more than prepared to offer-“ Vincent can barely get the words out before the ninja slams a fist down on his desk. The sudden thump rattles his precariously-perched coffee mug, and he has to catch it by the handle before it tips over onto the ugly carpet of his office.

“I’m not here to beg on my knees for… for _humanitarian aid_ , Vincent!” For a moment, Yuffie looks like she might be considering taking hold of the large carved stone Bahamut paperweight next to her hand and throwing it at his head. Or possibly through the window. At such short range, a brief fear for his reaction time crosses his mind. “We’ll support ourselves. As long as _I_ sit at the top of the Pagoda my people will never want for anything. But this is about autonomy, Vincent. I’m not going to start fixing my country on someone else’s dime. Wutai has more pride than that.”

The Empress’s stony gaze softens, and as if by magic she seems to fall back into the light and airy façade of the girl that the former Turk has known for roughly eleven years. She clears a spot on his desk with a sweeping motion and plops herself onto the empty space, crossing one bare leg over the other as she fixes him with her sweetest (and, she hopes, least creepy) smile. Vincent harrumphs to himself almost comically, averting his eyes from the woman in front of him and trying to bring some order to the complete nightmare that she’s managed to inflict upon his desk. The silence between them stretches, awkward in the wake of her sudden and righteous anger. It continues to stretch, like a cheap sticky hand from a Gold Saucer crane game, broken only by the shuffling of papers. The ninja clears her throat in a pointed manner, bringing a hand to her mouth demurely in a motion that seems only recently ingrained into her habits.

“I hired them into my Administrative Research department because Reeve downsized Intel and incorporated it into Public Safety after you left,” Vincent offers without preamble. When Yuffie’s expression begins to tilt towards confused, he continues. “You trained all of your operatives exceptionally well and I figured I’d be lucky to have them, so when Intel’s budget got slashed I… re-appropriated my new assets accordingly.”

“That’s…” Yuffie begins, both eyebrows raising slightly as she processes the information. “That’s weirdly sweet of you. Are you sure you’re not a mole-man?”

“Rumors of my love for caves and tunnels have been greatly exaggerated.” Vincent brings his coffee cup to his lips, a smile shining in his red eyes as he catches the ninja’s gaze over the rim. He almost looks like he might be about to wink, and the Empress entertains a momentary panic that she really is in the presence of a flirtatious evil twin intent upon world domination. It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing they’d ever faced, to be honest.

“Didn’t you just spit into that?” she asks instead, her tone innocent. Her face splits into a grin as the gunman spit-takes again, coffee dribbling onto his chin. He coughs and sets the mug aside, his fleeting good mood lost as he makes a face at the complete waste of semi-decent caffeine.

“ _Thank you_ , Yuffie,” he grumbles as he wipes some of the spilt drink from his chin with the back of his hand.

“One of the many free services I offer,” she says with a wide smile. When Vincent doesn’t immediately offer another quip to continue the conversation, her expression starts to falter. “So, uh,” she prompts after a quiet moment, “the Materia?”

The silence that follows her words is nearly deafening.

“…um,” Vincent intones after his entirely too lengthy moment of serious contemplation. This is, quite possibly, the worst noise he could possibly make in this situation. He almost looks ashamed of himself, but that would require facial muscles that, Yuffie thinks to herself in a private moment of cruelty, probably atrophied sometime in the past forty years.  

“Vincent,” she says, her tone calm and level. “Where the _frick_ is my Materia?”

 


	3. open mouth, insert chrome boot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve never been entirely certain how to talk to you.” Yuffie’s brow furrows as she stands resolutely beside him, gaze shifting to regard him with confusion out of the corner of her eye.
> 
> “We’re all well aware that you can’t talk to women, Vincent. It’s why we found you in that coffin in the first place.”

Her All Materia, as it turns out, have been distributed. To the entire Administrative Research department.

Vincent stands silently next to the irate Empress of Wutai, the awkward tinny elevator music the only thing breaking the silence besides the ding of each floor as it passes by. Wordlessly, the gunman draws his Death Penalty and pulls a perfect sphere of red Summon Materia out of the slot on the handle. He presents it to the woman at his side, who holds out a hand in a fluid, dainty motion that seems almost at odds with her bold personality. He drops it into her palm and she takes it without so much as looking at him, stuffing it down the front of her heavily-embroidered orange obi.

“I’m-“ the Head of Public Safety starts to apologize, but Yuffie holds up a hand to shush him. She still has yet to do anything but stare intently at the elevator doors, looking almost like she wants to burn a hole right through them with her mind.

“I’m not talking to you,” she says, her tone clipped. Beside her, Vincent re-holsters his gun and goes back to looking at anything but the Empress. The floors tick by slowly, each progressive ding seemingly louder than the last as they descend into the bowels of the WRO complex. The silence is oppressive, and the black-haired man finds himself trying not to fidget in the emptiness.

“I watched your coronation,” he offers as they pass the ground floor, only the switch from natural sunlight to fluorescent strip lights outside the glass-walled elevator marking the transition. “It was-“

“It was the worst.” Yuffie crosses her arms, still staring resolutely ahead. “You ever worn twelve layers of silk at once? Total grossness. My handmaidens had to peel me out and hose me off by the end of it.”

“But you looked nice,” Vincent counters. The compliment is less of a spoken sentence and more of a petulant grumble, said almost to the tips of his impeccably-shined and sensible boots. He has, thankfully, done away with the pointy gold clown shoes- though the decorative metal caps at the tips of his toes match what he still wears of his gauntlet.

“And _you_ didn’t look too bad in that leather onesie you used to wear, but I bet all your personal space issues stemmed from your aura of _stank_.” The gunman’s attention immediately refocuses from his shoes to the woman beside him, accompanied by an indignant expression that only just barely makes itself known. His eyebrows draw together slightly, red eyes narrowing as his lips thin into something approximating a frown. If that’s how she wants it, he thinks to himself, he can give as good as he gets.

“I suppose you would know,” he begins, drawing the smallest of sideways glances from the ninja who is trying, quite resolutely, to ignore him. “After all, weren’t you the one that insisted that jungles didn’t have mud?

“I’m still not talking to you,” Yuffie answers. She goes back to staring at the elevator doors, but her fingers twitch almost nervously where they grip her opposite arm. An expression that could almost be called a smile spreads across his lips at her reaction, but its miniscule size reduces it to the level of a smirk- which, quite honestly, fits the entire situation better anyway.

“That was right before you tripped and fell face-first into a swamp, wasn’t it?” Vincent crosses his arms, mirroring the Wutain woman’s posture as he catches her eye in the reflection on the stainless steel elevator doors. She immediately looks away, making a decidedly un-ladylike face as she shifts her stance away from her teasing former teammate.

“We are _not_ having this discussion,” Yuffie enunciates each word precisely, her chin tilting up defiantly as she stares at the glass wall on her other side. She even goes so far as to close her eyes when he tries to catch her gaze again in the reflection on the glass elevator wall.

“We had to throw you in the ocean before we could let you on the Tiny Bronco, didn’t we?” He can actually watch her shoulders rise as the Empress tries not to take the bait, taking deep breaths that are punctuated neatly by the incessant dinging of each underground floor as it passes them by. The smirk returns in full force as he plays his trump card in their stand-off. “Cid and Barret threw you so hard that your shorts-“

“Vincent Valentine, you shit-for-brains son of a Sahagin!” Yuffie whirls on him suddenly, jumping at his face like an enraged monster armed to the teeth with concealed ninja weapons. The ensuing tussle is loud enough, and punctuated with enough angry Wutain cursing, that the two of them don’t even notice as the elevator slows to a stop and the doors open into a busy hallway- full, almost to bursting, with members of the Administrative Research department on their way home. Not a single one of the assembled former receptionists and office ladies moves to assist either party, though one woman puts her hand in the door to keep it from closing on the show.

Both tusslers are evenly matched, though Vincent manages to get the Empress into a headlock with his dominant arm after a few angry moments of twisting limbs and snapping teeth. The ninja immediately braces both feet on the elevator wall and pushes with everything she has, driving her former teammate into the far wall behind her. All she hears is a winded grunt before her tormentor’s grip is slack enough for her to duck out and away, which she takes immediate advantage of. A tight waterkick sends the department head to the ground on a knee, but only long enough for him to snatch her up around the waist and haul her up into the air over his shoulder. Yuffie is the first to notice their audience, and only because she faces them as she twists her spine like a cat and hooks both legs around Vincent’s neck. Without any further warning she throws her entire weight to the whims of gravity, twisting again to keep herself from ending up on the bottom of the pile. The gunman topples to the floor behind her and she tucks into a roll, popping to her feet a moment later just outside the elevator doors. 

“You’re lucky I like you, Vinny,” Yuffie hisses, quiet enough that most of the assembled former Intel officers can’t hear her. She diligently tames her short hair and quickly adjusts her slightly twisted obi, straightening the folds of the short sleeveless kimono underneath with a sharp tug. Her shorts are ripped slightly on one side, and four parallel scratches run almost the entire circumference of one leg, but she gives both things a cursory once-over before immediately paying them no mind.

“And why is that?” The man in question asks as he picks himself up off the floor and dusts himself off. His various employees give him a wide berth as he walks out of the elevator, not daring to try and pass him to get out of work any quicker. The elevator doors close behind him with a ding, and a hush falls over the hallway.

“Hello my former minions!” Yuffie throws her hands up in the air instead of answering, addressing the crowd of Administrative Research operatives. “The Great Ninja Yuffie Kisaragi has returned to grace you with her glorious presence!” A ripple of laughter passes through the crowd of former receptionists and office ladies like a wave, all of them long-since used to their previous boss’ cheerful antics.

“You were issued a single mastered All Materia when you were selected for the Administrative Research department of the WRO. I ask that you return those Materia to me now, no questions asked.” Vincent isn’t one to mince words, even though those words incite a collective groan from his operatives. But each and every woman assembled in the elevator bay on her way home from work is a consummate professional, and not a single one of them questions the order. Approximately half the crowd draws weapons of some kind or another, ranging from throwing stars and pinwheels to large pistols and the occasional electro-mag baton, and in unison they begin un-linking the Materia in question. The other half of the crowd pulls shining blue crystals out of linked slots on decorative bangles and armlets, a few of the women pulling their massive hairpins from their impeccably-coiffed up-dos in order to return their department-issue All.

Yuffie produces the ratty old black and silver silk bag the Materia had at one point resided in from somewhere on her person, holding it out in front of her with a smile on her face. A loose line of her former operatives begins to form in front of her, each woman dropping her All Materia in the sack before proceeding to the elevator behind the Empress. With each perfect blue sphere that falls into the bag, her smile steadily widens.

“So,” Vincent intones, standing at Yuffie’s side with his hands clasped behind his back. His voice is low enough that the Administrative Research operatives can’t hear, busy as they are with small talk on their way through the line to the elevator. “Why am I lucky?”

“It’s punishable by beheading to lay a hand upon a member of the Imperial Family,” the Empress deadpans back in a theatrical whisper, turning to look up at the mildly concerned expression making its way across the taller man’s face. “But don’t worry, it’s cool. You’ve been laying hands on me since I was like sixteen. If I cared you’d already be dead.” She turns back to the line of operatives waiting for the elevator just in time to miss the choked sputter that escapes the department head. The woman currently standing in front of the ninja gives her an odd look, calculating blue eyes shifting from her former boss to her new one and back once or twice before she drops her All Materia in the sack and goes to join the group waiting for the next elevator.

“Beheading?” Several more of the operatives pass through the line before Vincent dares to speak again, clearing his throat momentarily to avoid any embarrassing squeaks or strange noises. It’s nothing new- talking to Yuffie and her overpowering personality has always made him feel like he’s fifteen again and trying not to put an expensive boot in his own mouth. Nobody is ever quite sure what to say to her, perhaps besides Tifa, and it keeps him off-balance.

“Don’t worry about it,” Yuffie assures him as she cinches the bag shut around the last of the Materia and ties it to the heavy leather belt resting just below the bottom fold of her obnoxiously orange obi. The elevator opens, the remaining operatives filing into it as they holster their weapons and redo their hair to replace their hairpins. “Seriously, you can lay your hands on me as often as you want, I’m not gonna have you beheaded for daring to touch the Imperial personage.” The ninja pauses, almost as though considering what she just said- but no. “This bag seems heavier than I remember,” she says instead, swinging her hip from side to side to make the bag swing back and forth. Her knee-high black boots squeak on the shiny floor as she moves, adding an element of sheer absurdity to the moment.

“Well, I doubt you’ve done much heavy lifting in the past six months,” Vincent quips, almost immediately regretting it as the Empress stills her squeaky wiggling and turns a stiff expression on him- complete with an elegant and regally-arched brow. Foot, meet mouth. It’s probably a good thing, the department head thinks, that he doesn’t wear his old boots anymore.

“Says the guy riding a desk,” she immediately quips back. “Gettin’ kinda rusty in your old age, dude? I weigh like a buck twenty on a bad day and I put you on the floor twice in like ten seconds.” The ninja pulls a faux concerned expression, tapping lightly on her former teammate’s midriff with the back of her knuckles. “Maybe you should lay off the Corel Fried Chocobo. That stuff’ll go straight to your gut.”

 “I won’t dignify that with an answer,” Vincent grumbles.

“Meeh meh meh mehehehehmemeh,” Yuffie mocks, flapping one hand like a mouth in his general direction. For a split second Vincent almost wishes that he had his cloak and bandanna back, so he could sink into them like a turtle and hide the embarrassed flush slowly creeping up over the top of his tightly-buttoned white shirt collar. Next to him, the Empress of Wutai casually bumps the elevator call button with her hip, leaning against the wall as though their needling tit-for-tat exchange of insults is simply par for the course.

“If you’re here…” Vincent begins after a moment of silence, unable to take the lack of conversation. In any other situation he would be happy to stay silent, observing from the relative safety of un-involvement, but being in close proximity with Yuffie and not being in a constant stream of conversation is something he can’t seem to stand. Silence and Yuffie are two things that shouldn’t mix- that don’t mix at all, really, and it makes him uneasy.

“Millfy can fool my advisors for at least like a week. The only way I’m getting shit for this is if the other Mighty Gods show up to my place unannounced.” The ninja pauses, as though calculating the odds of this happening, and her face slowly draws into a grimace as the weight of her realization dawns over her. She begins pushing the elevator call button at an incessant pace, trying to affect a nonchalant air despite the frantic motion of her hand.

“Should I be expecting a call from the Wutain Consulate-General when I get back to my office?” Red eyes shining with amusement, Vincent crosses his arms and affects an expression that could almost be considered a small, genuine smile. One traitorous eyebrow rises as he regards the frantically casual ninja in front of him.

“ _No_ ,” Yuffie insists, jumping up and crowding the elevator doors as soon as the up arrow lights with a cheery ding. As soon as the door is open far enough for her to squeeze through, she’s at the button panel and pushing the button for the main lobby with the same amount of urgency as her earlier frantic pressing. Vincent only barely manages to squeeze into the elevator with all of his extremities, the door sliding shut behind him to trap them both in a prison of unbearably slow-paced instrumental music.

It’s almost a fact of their existence at this point that neither of them can stand to be silent while the other is in their presence.

“This whole dog and chocobo show wouldn’t have happened if you would just answer your damn PHS when you see my number on your caller ID,” Yuffie suddenly blurts out. She turns from where she’s staring herself down in her own reflection, her foot tapping faster than a rabbit’s, to pin Vincent against the far wall with a glare. “Like, I get it. You don’t actually like me all that much. But ten years is a really long time to make me talk to an answering machine, Vinny.”

“I don’t… _not_ like you,” Vincent flounders at his words for a moment, feeling like an idiot as soon as he speaks.

“You’ve made it pretty clear that you don’t _like_ me, either.” The ninja turns away, going back to staring herself down in the reflective doors. The incessant beeping of the elevator as it counts each floor is maddening, especially against the backdrop of an instrumental pop song. Beside her, the department head resists the urge to scratch the nervous itch taking up residence on the back of his neck, crossing and uncrossing his arms in an effort to find something else to do with his hands.

“It’s…” he finally begins, trying not to trail off into silence as he attempts to explain himself. “I’ve never been entirely certain how to talk to you.” Yuffie’s brow furrows as she stands resolutely beside him, gaze shifting to regard him with confusion out of the corner of her eye.

“We’re all well aware that you can’t talk to women, Vincent. It’s why we found you in that coffin in the first place.” The ninja crosses her arms, dragging her eyes away from the man next to her to glare intently at the elevator doors again. She watches him fidget in the reflection, shifting his weight from foot to foot and pulling at the cuffs of his suit jacket to straighten them like it’s some sort of nervous tic.

“That’s not… I can talk to women. You’re just a little more difficult, is all.” When Yuffie deigns to turn her head his way and give him a venomous look fit only for an Empress, Vincent runs his gloved gun hand through his short hair with a huff of a sigh. “I make an ass of myself every time we talk. Making you leave a message gives me time to think of an answer that isn’t complete shit.”

“Is that why you got rid of the boots?” Vincent turns to look at the diminutive Wutain woman beside him, confusion creeping its way through his expression the longer he lets the silence stretch on. “So you’d stop hurting yourself every time you stuck both feet in your mouth?” she clarifies, a mischievous teasing glint alighting in her eyes.

“They also didn’t go with the suit,” he admits with a grumble. The elevator slows to a stop at the building’s lobby level, the doors sliding open as Yuffie begins to laugh. She claps him on the arm, making a show of wiping a tear from her eye as she turns to face him while backing out of the elevator car.

“Call me,” she orders, holding one hand to the side of her head in the shape of a phone. The other she uses to hold the door open, prolonging their conversation. “You need to work on your speaking skills and I need something to keep me from totally dying of boredom. Running a country is like, the worst. I don’t know how the hell the Shinra ever did it.” Vincent can’t find it in himself to object, still fidgeting with his hands like he’s unsure what to do with them. It’s odd to see him so off-balance, but at the same time strangely comforting. It’s nice to know that even someone like the WRO’s Head of the Department of Public Safety has little things in life that he doesn’t know how to handle.

“I have a new phone,” he tries to say, but Yuffie makes a show of rolling her eyes as hard as she can. She gets some head motion into it, just for extra effect.

“I _don’t_. You should know my number by now.” The Empress pauses, as if considering something for a moment. “You _do_ know my number, right?” Vincent pauses on her question a moment too long, because the aggressive eye-rolling comes into play again.

“Of course I-“ before he can reassure her, he’s cut off as the small woman pulls a ballpoint pen from somewhere on her person with one hand and grabs his gun hand with the other. “Yuffie, what do you think-“

“I’m giving you my number, Zemzelett-for-brains. What’s it look like?” She is, in fact, scrawling a quick series of numbers across the bare patch of wrist she’s exposed by pushing up his shirt cuff. They burn in the wake of her hard scratching, turning his pale skin red around the black lines. Her ugly chicken scratch looks more like careless black stitches across his arm than the last desperate plea of an extremely bored world leader. She signs her handiwork with a heart and relinquishes her grip on his arm with a smile and a wave, already backing away from the elevator doors to let them close on her escape.

“This isn’t legible in the slightest.” Vincent follows her into the WRO building’s lobby as though the action is automatic, the affected wrist held at eye level as he attempts to read the numbers scratched across his skin. Yuffie makes a pained noise much like she had back in his office, followed by the same abortive hair-pulling gestures.

“You have another wrist-“ she turns and starts to grab for his gauntleted hand, her pen at the ready.

“You don’t need to give me your number, Yuffie. I know it.” By the time he gets the words out, she’s already grasped his hand in her own. The revelation leaves her without anything to follow the action, and the soft tone of his words makes her pause. The gold plates of his clawed glove are warm under her palm, and her proximity to the taller man forces her to tilt her head back to look him in the eye.

“That was smooth,” the ninja observes. “I dig it. You been watching romance dramas or something?” Vincent blinks in confusion, unsure- as always- how to reply to the young Empress.

“I don’t own a television,” he blurts out in lieu of an answer. Yuffie makes a sour face, as though the mere concept is absolutely unthinkable to her. He can practically hear the disgusted noise that he knows she wants to make, and it only takes a few extra seconds before she gives in to the urge and makes a strangled, gurgling noise in the back of her throat.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” she finally says.

“You could let me go,” Vincent motions with a nod of his head to where she still has her hand wrapped around his. “I’m going to need that hand to do all the paperwork that comes along with revoking access to an entire department’s worth of company-issue Materia.”

Rather than letting him go completely, Yuffie trades holding his hand for gently placing both hands on his cheeks. She smiles at him gently, and the Department Head prays that the red flush he can feel creeping up to the tips of his ears isn’t immediately noticeable. The elevator bay is in the middle of the building’s lobby, and out of the corner of his eye he can see several of the Administrative Research operatives still milling around and trying not to look too interested in his exchange with the Empress of Wutai.

“Am I an idiot sandwich?” He tries, for the first time in his life, to be intentionally obtuse.

“Yes,” Yuffie replies in a serious tone. “But thank you for doing this for me. We need that Materia.”

Vincent can’t tell if she’s using the royal We, or if he’s hearing Yuffie Kisaragi, Single White Rose of Wutai, Empress of the Pagoda, Mighty God of Omni, and Daughter of Leviathan, embracing her role as caretaker of and provider for her people. He doesn’t have much time to think about it, as she leans up onto her tiptoes and plants a soft kiss on his cheek and he promptly forgets what words are.

“Also,” she whispers into his ear as she draws away, “I was like. Maybe only half-kidding about the Imperial Concubines thing.”

The shock must be evident on his face, because Yuffie pats him on the chest twice before twirling away into the lobby proper. She flashes him a massive grin, and holds one hand up to the side of her face in the shape of a PHS.

“Call me!” she yells, skipping backwards towards the front doors of the building. As she turns to head out the main entrance, Vincent catches a glimpse of something red clutched in her free hand- something, he realizes with a start, that she had snatched as she twirled away. He looks down at his chest and takes a mental inventory, immediately noticing that she had stolen not only his pocket square, but his lapel and tie pins as well.

“Yuffie!” His angry yell is only met with gleeful laughter as the Empress of Wutai escapes out the front doors of the WRO into the early afternoon sunlight. He only manages a few steps across the lobby in chase before his breast pocket starts to beep, and the department head stops short and pulls out his PHS with a sigh.

“Director Valentine,” he answers in a clipped tone. The Director of Public Safety has a feeling that he already knows what the call is about.

“Sir, uh…” the nervous voice of his secretary comes over the line. Resignedly, the tall man turns and strides back to the elevator bay. “The Wutain Consulate-General is on hold for you on video line three. They won’t say what it’s about.”

“I’ll take it in my office,” Vincent says. Turning from the call button to face the polished chrome doors of the elevator, he makes a sudden strangled noise in the back of his throat.

“Sir, are you alright?” He hangs up on his secretary as the doors to the elevator open, and he ducks inside the mercifully empty car and pushes the close button with the same nonchalant urgency that Yuffie had only minutes previously. The doors close painfully slowly in front of him, and he gets another good look at the vibrant red lip print marring his cheek as he stares down his reflection. Had Yuffie been wearing makeup? He didn’t recall that she had been, but the proof was right there all over his face.

He wipes at his cheek with the back of his wrist, hoping to smear the worst of it off onto the dark fabric of his suit before he has to leave the relative safety and privacy of the elevator. The lipstick doesn’t even so much as smudge, though somehow it still manages to transfer a lovely pinkish smear onto the white cuff of his shirt. As the elevator climbs towards the nineteenth floor, he’s struck by the unfortunate realization that if the Wutain Consulate-General had called on a video line, they were insisting on a video conference call.

“Shit.”

For not the first time, and almost certainly not the last time, Vincent Valentine seriously reconsiders his decision to stop wearing the cloak. Yuffie Kisaragi would be the death of his dignity yet.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's it that's the show


End file.
